BlackHole the Highest Reported Malware in Q3-2012, Says AVG

As per the "Community Powered Threat Report" by AVG, a security company, for July-September 2012, the top malware demand both as a crime-kit (76%) as well as in market share (63%) is BlackHole the infamous toolkit for attack.

Also, with the introduction of BlackHole version 2.0, specialists predict there'll be an even greater market share for the kit, while the assaults designed with it are expected to be still more dangerous owing to the incorporation of sophisticated evasion-mechanisms into the new version.

Chief Technology Officer Yuval Ben-Itzhak at AVG Technologies says that the BlackHole's sophistication and strength as an attack toolkit stems from its polymorphic nature while its extremely mystifying code makes it easy to circumvent anti-virus software. It also has a fast capability to update that causes difficulty for conventional anti-virus firms towards tracing its origin. All these make the toolkit so very successful, explains Ben-Itzhak. Securityweek.com published this dated October 25, 2012.

Worryingly, during Q3-2012, Web-surfers on social-networking sites too became targeted with a spree of assaults that relied on the infamous BlackHole like in the case of Facebook. The assaults neither allowed consumers to log onto personal accounts nor gain admission into any software or game since the attackers launched their operations from several coordinated ad-servers outside the network. Incidentally, the number of attacks generated rose outstandingly to more than 1.6m from 250,000 recorded over 8-hrs.

Furthermore, AVG's report finds that graphic or other pictorial files are, like always, regarded as safe since they're difficult to execute. Nonetheless, one fresh assault has been found experimentally at AVG that seeks one hijacked Web-server which can run image files. Consequently, innocuous-appearing such files could get utilized for serving harmful payload to gullible website users who may access the hijacked sites.

Alongside all of the above AVG reports that during Q3-2012, it detected one prolific malware item named "Lock Screen." This one, which aimed at Czech Web-surfers, has extremely primitive methodologies with gaps in success rate.

Finally, according to AVG, USA is still on top slot of spam-spewing nations, with 41.7% of total junk e-mails coming from it and UK following at 7.9%.